Wendy Williams is back in the purple chair. In an Instagram post, the former host of her eponymously named talk show could be seen smiling on her former show’s throne in a plug for her forthcoming podcast.
“Stay tuned,” Wendy hashtagged the pic, which has the 58-year-old star sitting with her legs crossed and wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the words “The Wendy Experience.” She also hashtagged her famous catchphrase “How you doin,” and gave a shout-out to her new publicist, Shawn Zanotti.
Last month, Zanotti told Page Six that Williams had returned from an August stint at a wellness facility for alcohol rehab. He relayed to her fans that the host is focused on “healing,” and shared a comment from Williams that she is now “back and better than ever.”
It was announced in June that The Wendy Williams Show would be ending after 13 seasons. Rumors circulated about why, including Williams’ health decline. The host has battled addiction and is suffering from Grave’s Disease.
Shortly after the show’s final episode in June, which was hosted by fill-in host Sherri Shepherd, Williams posted an image of herself to her podcast’s Instagram with the caption, “When one door closes a LARGER one Opens!”
Williams subsequently went public about an ongoing battle over control over her finances.
Taylor Swift knew that the initial round of dates she announced for her upcoming Eras tour wouldn’t be enough to satisfy fans. That’s why she’s just added a round of new dates to her itinerary.
“UM. Looks like I’ll get to see more of your beautiful faces than previously expected…we’re adding 8 shows to the tour,” Taylor wrote on Twitter.
The new shows include April 14 in Tampa, FL; May 5 in Nashville, TN; May 14 in Philadelphia; May 21 in Foxborough, MA; May 28 in East Rutherford, NJ; July 23 in Seattle, WA; July 28 in Santa Clara, CA; and August 3 in Los Angeles, CA. Some of the opening acts are slightly different than the ones she’s already announced for those cities.
Verified fan presales start November 15.
When she first announced the tour, Taylor wrote that it would be “a journey through the musical eras of my career (past and present!).”
(NEW YORK) — The U.S. added 261,000 jobs in October, exceeding economist expectations and sending a positive signal for the economy days before the midterm elections.
The unemployment rate increased to 3.7%. However, the unemployment has stood between a narrow range of 3.5% and 3.7% since March, the government data said.
The strongest job gains came in health care, manufacturing and professional and technical services.
The report arrives two days after Fed Chair Jerome Powell announced another jumbo-sized interest rate hike, intensifying the central bank’s fight against inflation and stoking fears of a downturn.
The aggressive move is the latest in a string of borrowing cost increases imposed by the Fed in recent months as it tries to slash price increases by cooling the economy and choking off demand. The approach, however, risks tipping the U.S. into a recession and putting millions out of work.
While hiring has slowed from a breakneck pace earlier in the year, the labor market continues to defy recession concerns.
The number of job openings increased in September, a sign that the need for workers remains robust, government data released Tuesday showed. However, hiring and people quitting fell slightly in September, suggesting that the demand for labor from employers has begun to ebb.
While strong, the hiring in October falls well below the typical jobs added over a given month in 2022. Monthly job growth has averaged 407,000 thus far in 2022 versus 562,000 per month in 2021, the jobs data on Friday showed.
While some data points to an economic slowdown, a government report released last month showed significant economic growth over three months ending in September.
U.S. gross domestic product grew 2.6% over that period; by contrast, economic activity shrank a combined 2.2% over the first six months of the year.
The Celebration of Black Cinema & Television typically honors achievements in Black filmmaking, and this year is no different. On Monday, December 5, many will gather at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles to celebrate a group of talented individuals and their accomplishments in 2022.
Included in this year’s class of honorees are Angela Bassett, who will receive the Career Achievement Award, and Michael B. Jordan, who’ll be honored with the Melvin Van Peebles Trailblazer Award. The event’s Groundbreaker Award will go to Kid Cudi for his Netflix series, Entergalactic, and the Icon Award to Motown founder Berry Gordy.
Quinta Brunson, P-Valley‘s Nicco Annan, Creed III‘s Jonathan Majors, Atlanta‘s Brian Tyree Henry and more will also be recognized at this year’s event.
“The Celebration of Black Cinema & Televisionhas grown tremendously over the last five years,” CCA CEO Joey Berlin said in a statement. “We’re thrilled to be able to recognize such outstanding projects across both film and television, and to honor these incredible actors and filmmakers for their work.”
The 2022 Celebration of Black Cinema & Television, sponsored by the Critics Choice Association, will air on KTLA in January and on Nexstar stations during Black History Month. Comedian Bill Bellamy will host the event.
(NEW YORK) — Minnesota elections officials are working to coordinate law enforcement responsibilities on Election Day after the husband of a GOP nominee for the state’s top election post was heard on a leaked recording calling for off-duty law enforcement officers to police poll workers at election sites — in apparent violation of state regulations.
In an audio recording of a Tea Party Patriots meeting in Champlin, Minnesota, last month, Marty Probst, the husband of Minnesota GOP Secretary of State candidate Kim Crockett, is heard urging conservative supporters to send sheriffs and deputies to form an Election Day “SWAT team.”
“If you got friends or family or whatever in sheriff deputies or sheriffs, we need them on Election Day,” Probst said. “That’s part of the SWAT team to get out when certain places don’t follow the rules that they are supposed to.”
The comments represent a growing trend across the country, in which some supporters of former President Donald Trump, driven by misinformation surrounding the results of the 2020 election, are recruiting off-duty law enforcement and ex-military personnel to serve as poll watchers.
“They won’t be able to steal this election the same way they stole 2020!” tweeted Joseph Flynn, president of The America Project, one of the organizations leading the effort to recruit first responders for that purpose.
The Minnesota meeting included several high-profile attendees from the Minnesota Republican Party and the Republican National Committee. Following Probst’s remarks, RNC Minnesota Election Integrity Director Lukas Severson said, “He brought up a great point there — we are still looking for folks who would like to join us in our War Room to answer calls from the hotline.”
Cassondra Knudson, the spokesperson for incumbent Secretary of State Steve Simon, told ABC News that Minnesota law does not allow law enforcement to be situated in a polling place for any purpose other than responding to a call for assistance.
“We’re working in coordination with the [Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension] to ensure law enforcement know their role on Election Day,” Knudson said. “Minnesota has guidelines for who can be in be in polling places and how they can behave. This would not allow for law enforcement to be situated in a polling place for any purpose other than responding to a call for assistance.”
“Recruiting people based on lies is problematic,” Sean Morales-Doyle, acting director of voting rights at the nonprofit, nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, told ABC News last month. “Skepticism is one thing, but coming to that job believing that the election was stolen and on the lookout for nonexistent conspiracies and fraud is problematic.”
In addition, said Morales-Doyle, “There’s a history of problems with intimidation by poll watchers in this country — specifically a history of efforts to use off-duty law enforcement and poll watchers to accomplish racially discriminatory intimidation, so it gives me concern when you see that kind of recruitment.”
The recording of the Tea Party Patriots meeting was obtained and published by the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Other high-profile attendees included Minnesota GOP Deputy Chair Donna Bergstrom and Minnesota RNC Committeewoman Barb Sutter.
Neither Probst nor representatives for Crockett’s campaign responded to ABC News’ requests for comment.
Patrick McMullan/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — Billy McFarland, the convicted founder behind 2017’s Fyre Festival, which rocked social media, is apologizing for his role in controversial music festival.
“I need to apologize. And that is the first and the last thing that needs to be done,” McFarland said. “I let people down. I let down employees. I let down their families. I let down investors. So I need to apologize. I’m wrong and it’s bad.”
McFarland pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud in federal court in 2018, and admitted to using fake documents to attract investors, who put more than $26 million into his company, Fyre Media, the host of the Fyre Festival.
He has since served almost four years of a six year sentence, including two stints in solitary confinement, but is now out of prison on supervised release. He recently told ABC News’ Good Morning America that he’s had time to reflect on his wrongdoings while in prison.
“I was wrong. I messed up. And I was so driven by this desperate desire to prove people right … I think I was just so insecure that I thought the only way to prove myself to them was to succeed,” he said. “That led me down just this terrible path of bad decisions.”
“I started lying to get the money and I would literally wake up every day to a document that we called, ‘Urgent Payment Sheet.’ And it had an amount of money that I had to acquire before the bank closed that day to stop the company from going underwater,” he continued. “So I was literally day-by-day doing whatever it took. And looking back, it was so incredibly stupid.”
In 2017, word spread of a music festival that promised “an immersive” experience on a small island in the Bahamas. The event was touted by top models and social media influencers and nearly 5,000 hopeful attendees bought in.
Tickets ranged from $500 to $12,000 and customers were led to expect extravagant accommodations and celebrity chef-cooked meals. Instead, the first guests to arrive to the scheduled two week experience received boxes with plain cheese sandwiches and lodging in the form of Federal Emergency Management Agency and U.N. disaster tents.
As chaos quickly ensued on the island and the event’s failure went viral on social media, Fyre Festival co-founders McFarland and rapper Ja Rule were forced to cancel the event.
Ja Rule later apologized in a note on Twitter, writing, “I’m heartbroken at this moment. My partners and I wanted this to be an amazing event. It was NOT A SCAM … I truly apologize as this is NOT MY FAULT… but I’m taking responsibility. I’m deeply sorry to everyone who was inconvenienced by this.”
Ja Rule has never been charged in connection with the festival and he was later dismissed as a defendant in a civil lawsuit filed by attendees.
“I think the hardest thing for me is the trust that I violated and whether it was friends, investors, or employees, people gave up a lot to try to make this happen,” McFarland told GMA. “How do I call them now and look them in the eye when I let them down?”
McFarland has roughly $26 million in restitution to pay investors, vendors and concert-goers. His earnings will be garnished until it’s all been paid back.
Moving forward, McFarland is trying something new, launching a venture called “PYRT.” He said he knows he’ll need time to “slowly” win back trust, but said he’s changed and plans to keep evolving.
“I went way too fast before. So I need to do everything now in a manageable way that I can actually make work,” he said, adding, “I hope I continue to change for the next 40 years. So I’m certainly not done changing yet.”
Good Morning America co-anchor Robin Roberts will host 20/20 Presents Black Panther: In Search of Wakanda on Friday, in advance of the highly anticipated premiere of Marvel Studios’ Black Panther sequel, Wakanda Forever, on November 11. The one-hour program will explore the evolution of Black Panther from the comics to the big screen, and Wakanda Forever director Ryan Coogler will discuss the sequel to the 2018 blockbuster, and how it honors the legacy of its late star, Chadwick Boseman. Boseman’s widow, Simone, will also sit down for an exclusive interview with The View moderator Whoopi Goldberg. Marvel Studios is owned by Disney, the parent company of ABC News…
The Time Traveler’s Wife‘s Theo James has been tapped to lead the Netflix series The Gentlemen, based on Guy Ritchie‘s film of the same name, according to Deadline. The series centers on James’ character Eddie Halstead, “who has inherited his father’s sizeable estate only to discover that it’s sitting on top of a weed empire owned by the legendary Mickey Pearson,” per the entertainment website. Mickey was played by Matthew McConaughey in the 2019 movie. Halstead, a “straight-up soldier,” must navigate the British criminal underworld and take control of the operation. Ritchie co-wrote the pilot script, will direct the first two episodes and serve as an executive producer on the series…
The Wall Street Journal reports HBO Max has scrapped its new Degrassi series, according to Variety. The series, originally picked up for 10 episodes, would have been the sixth TV show in the franchise to date following The Kids of Degrassi Street, Degrassi Junior High, Degrassi High, Degrassi: The Next Generation and Degrassi: Next Class…
U2 frontman Bono was Stephen Colbert‘s guest on Thursday’s edition of CBS’ The Late Showwith Stephen Colbert promoting his new book, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, and revealed the clever, if not so honest way they got their big break.
“When we were kids…we had a big TV producer…come into our high school, cause he heard we wrote our own songs. And it was a break, gonna get our big break, on the national [television]. And we were arguing about how the song was going, it wasn’t going anywhere, none of the songs,” Bono told Colbert.
As they were arguing back and forth, Bono said, they heard a knock on the door, which turned out to be the TV exec.
“What are we gonna do? What are we gonna tell him? What are we gonna say,?” Bono recalls the band saying to each other. “And he walks in and [he says] ‘You write your own songs?…Could you play me one?'” Bono adds that he and bandmates Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. “improvised” by playing The Ramones‘ “Glad to See You Go,” claiming it was theirs.
That deception got U2 a TV appearance, though Bono was quick to explain that they did actually perform one of their own songs on the show.
Bono also performed a partly spoken-word, down-tempo orchestral version of the U2 The Joshua Tree classic “With or Without You.”
Surrender, out now, follows Bono from his childhood in Dublin, to the loss of his mother when he was 14, to the founding of U2 and their rise to global stardom. It also covers his activism, including his work to fight AIDS and extreme poverty.
After a week of spoofs, reveals, and more, Drake and 21 Savage‘s collaboration album, Her Loss, has arrived.
The highly anticipated album dropped Friday at midnight and boasts a total of 16 tracks. Although the majority of the songs feature both rappers, they also each have solo songs. 21 Savage has “3AM in Glenwood” all to himself while Drake takes the solo reins on “Middle of the Ocean,” “Jumbotron S*** Poppin,” “I Guess It’s F*** Me,” and “BackOutsideBoys.”
Her Loss sees Drake return to more traditional hip hop beats, a complete 180 from his most recent album Honestly, Nevermind, which saw the Canadian artist dabble in techno. Fans also get a bit of R&B Drake on this new project.
21 Savage and Drake first announced their new album on October 22, in the middle of their “Jimmy Cooks” music video. About 1:25 into the clip, they revealed the album is called Her Loss and it’ll be here on Friday, October 28. A few days later Drake shared that the release was pushed back a week to November 4 after their producer producer Noah “40” Shebib caught COVID-19.
Drake and 21 Savage are frequent collaborators, having previously teamed up on “Knife Talk,” from Drake’s album Certified Lover Boy, and “Mr. Right Now,” off 21 and Metro Boomin’s album Savage Mode II. They also joined forces on the tracks “Sneakin’” and “Issa.”
(NEW YORK) — Broad, bipartisan numbers of Americans are concerned that political divisions are increasing the risk of politically motivated violence in this country, with majorities across the board highly concerned about it in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll.
Who gets the blame, however, differs sharply among partisan and ideological groups.
A week after the attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a vast 88% of adults express concern that political divisions have gotten to the point that there’s an increased risk of politically motivated violence in this country. Sixty-three percent in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, are “very” concerned.
By contrast, asking which political party is more to blame for this risk produces a closely divided, strongly partisan result: 31% blame the Republican Party, 25% blame the Democratic Party and 32% blame both parties equally. Just 11% don’t blame either or both.
Overall concern is striking for how it crosses political lines, with rare levels of partisan agreement. Ninety-five percent of Democrats, 87% of Republicans and 86% of independents are concerned about the risk of political violence. So are 95% of liberals, 89% of moderates and 84% of conservatives.
That said, there are gaps as to the degree. About three-quarters of Democrats and liberals are very concerned about the risk, dropping to 58% of conservatives and 56% of Republicans — albeit still majorities in all cases.
In another political measure, 93% of voters for President Joe Biden in the 2020 election and 83% of Donald Trump voters are concerned about the risk of violence. Although, again, there is a difference in intensity: 78% of Biden voters are very concerned, compared to 55% of Trump voters.
There are other differences among groups. Women are 10 percentage points more apt than men to be very concerned about the risk of politically motivated violence — 68% vs. 58%. Just among Democrats, this includes a 13-point gap in strong concern between women and men.
Additionally, older people are much more apt to be very concerned, declining linearly with age — from 75% of those ages 65 and up, down to 47% of 18- to 29-year-olds.
Placing blame
As noted, blame reverts to partisan predispositions. Sixty-six percent of Democrats blame the Republican Party for the risk of violence, and 56% of Republicans blame the Democratic Party. Political independents, for their part, are likeliest to blame both parties equally.
There’s also a sharp difference between men and women, reflecting political preferences between the sexes. Women broadly blame the Republican Party more than the Democratic Party (38% vs. 18%). Men blame the Democratic Party over the GOP, albeit more narrowly (32% vs. 24%).
Methodology
This ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted by landline and cellular telephone from Oct. 30 to Nov. 2, 2022, in English and Spanish, among a random national sample of 1,005 adults. Results have a margin of sampling error of 4.0 percentage points, including the design effect. Partisan divisions in the full sample are 27%-27%-39%, Democrats-Republicans-independents.
